U.S. SEC charges 11 people, including Russians, with creating $300 mln crypto pyramid

WASHINGTON. Aug 1 (Interfax) - The United States' Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged 11 individuals for their roles in creating and promoting Forsage, a fraudulent crypto pyramid.

The crypto pyramid based on the Ponzi scheme raised more than $300 million from millions of retail investors worldwide, including in the U.S., the SEC said in a press release.

Those charged include the four founders of Forsage, who lived in Russia, Georgia and Indonesia, as well as three U.S.-based promoters engaged by the founders to endorse Forsage on its website and social media platforms.

According to the SEC's materials, in January 2020, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Jane Doe (also known as Lola Ferrari), Mikhail Sergeyev, and Sergei Maslakov launched the Forsage.io website that allowed millions of retail investors to enter into transactions via smart contracts that operated on the Ethereum, Tron, and Binance blockchains. However, Forsage operated as a pyramid scheme, in which assets from new investors were used to pay earlier investors in a typical Ponzi structure. Despite cease-and-desist actions against Forsage for operating as a fraud in September 2020 by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines and in March 2021 by the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, the defendants allegedly continued to promote the scheme while denying the claims in several YouTube videos and by other means.